Piggyback Marketing

Cost of sales is a big expense for start-ups.However without sales a business is not going to survive.One smart way to grow one’s business without much expense is to adopt piggyback marketing.Here’s Alok Kejriwal on piggyback marketing:

“When I launched contests2win.com, I really got lucky. I managed to convince MTV’s VJs in India to scream ‘log onto contests2win.com to win x and y prizes’ on the MTV channel all day long. MTV was keen to create online contests – I swapped my service for free mentions on TV.

I was piggy back riding them to a trip to the moon!Going piggyback marketing is hard work. It involves pavement pounding to find a gigantic and huge partner (compared to your size) who gifts you a winning lottery ticket in exchange for your unique product or service.

Why would anyone do so?

It’ a cross hair between circumstances and immediacy. Discovery Kids (USA), for instance, is keen to partner with high quality kids’ content providers and even share revenue on that content being hosted on that site. Now, buying ad space on Discovery media properties can drive start ups broke. But if you have content and they like it, you are on one massive piggyback! (I say this with experience – our kids’ property chimpoo.com features on Discovery and Viacom USA).

Foursquare has leveraged large brand relationships and has received massive & complimentary media promotions thanks to their unique offering of real time, location based service that just delights brands!

Work hard to find partners who can lift your Company’s profile and visibility via partnerships. Break your back to make the deal work. If, you finally do manage to get associated with them, that will be a ‘real marketing’ victory.”